A tour of/from the future, Georgetown School of Medicine, Washington, DC USA

After a long delayed scheduling process (medical students are BUSY), I got to take a tour of the medical education experience of fellow future inhabitant Konstantin Karmazin (@zenkkarma) at our local medical school with a family medicine department (@GUFamilyMed), Georgetown University School of Medicine.

From time to time I end up in medical schools, even though I don’t work in one, just to see how the future is coming along, because when you live in the future, you need compatriots :).

As we talked about the current medical education experience, I reflected on my own journey, with the innovation for its time being “email” (and it was not well received when I brought it up – “History isn’t something you look back at and say it was inevitable”). Today it’s a “whole bunch of other stuff” (but actually email is still not the norm between patients and physicians in medicine … ) and there’s still a need for people to connect their passion for medicine and science and health with the demands of medical education and interest in the future. It’s still really hard.

One advantage today is the greater availability of networks and especially in Washington, DC, the most social city in the United States (it’s why we’re here and how we connected – the system works!). Mentorship isn’t something that came to me until after I finished medical school, and now it’s everywhere for me – co-workers, patients, fellow physicians and physicians-in-training. You can’t discount the value of someone saying, “you know that thing you’re doing that’s different than everyone else, keep doing it, it’s really important.” That still happens for me (and from me to others), makes a huge difference.

Speaking of journeys, thanks for the walk, all the best discoveries happen that way….